After all, listeners can’t even purchase the album if they wanted to. When you take away the option to buy and force listeners to subscribe to a platform they may not even like, you’re essentially asking them to:

Drop the $10 subscription elsewhere and subscribe to Tidal for one album — or —

Keep both subscriptions, which is really asking them to pay $10 a month for a Kanye album and then $10 a month for the rest of their music and playlists elsewhere

‘The Life of Pablo’ won’t save Tidal, but decisions like these could lead more users away from streaming music and back into pirating it.